


for the thirst and for the hunger, come the conference of birds

by FangirlKats



Series: of words, birds, and capitalism. [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: And they have issues, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Behavior, Dialogue Heavy, Earth C (Homestuck), Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Minor Dave Strider/Karkat Vantas, Minor Rose Lalonde/Kanaya Maryam, Post-Canon, The Alpha Kids - Freeform, anyway thats all, because im obsessed with the striders, fixing that, i literally mention bro in every fic, never gonna give you up, so here i am, thats just how homestuck be, there, there's none actually, there's not enough dirk and karkat interactions, they are all friends and i will die on that hill, wait
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-17
Updated: 2020-12-17
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:40:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28134813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FangirlKats/pseuds/FangirlKats
Summary: Well, this was a testament to how overconfidence could be poisonous. Dirk was stricken with the immediate realization that he didn’t actually know Karkat and this was a horrible idea and why did he even try to talk to people, it always ended horribly.“Well, I should probably-”“You remind me of him.”
Relationships: Dirk Strider & Karkat Vantas, Sollux Captor & Karkat Vantas
Series: of words, birds, and capitalism. [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2022680
Comments: 2
Kudos: 14





	for the thirst and for the hunger, come the conference of birds

**Author's Note:**

> Oh, I think I landed  
> Where there are miracles at work  
> For the thirst and for the hunger  
> Come the conference of birds

When Dirk imagined the post-Sburb celebration, he didn’t imagine it’d be on an empty grass field that spanned for miles in every direction with no disruption except for hills at random intervals. But then again, he also never expected to break off from the group to talk to his brother’s not-a-boyfriend either. The experience was being properly educational, and he wasn’t sure if he liked it.

“I thought you’d be joining in on the celebrations,” he said, disrupting Karkat, who was standing atop of a hill, looking at the horizon with a somber expression on his face. “Okay, no, that’s not true. But I definitely thought you’d be with Dave, at least. From what he tells me, you haven’t spent all that much time apart since you first met on the meteor.”

Aside from the obvious topic of Bro and all the issues that came with it, Dave had talked about little else aside from Karkat, which left Dirk feeling like he knew him way more than he actually did.

“Yeah, but he’s rubbing off on me too much. It's disgusting. I disgust me.”

Dirk forced himself to swallow down a chuckle. “If it’s any consolation… As someone who has spent most of his life alone, I know what it’s like to want to hold onto someone once you have them.”

“Hm.”

Well, this was a testament to how overconfidence could be poisonous. Dirk was stricken with the immediate realization that he didn’t actually know Karkat and this was a horrible idea and why did he even try to talk to people, it always ended horribly.

“Well, I should probably-”  
  
“You remind me of him.” That gave him pause.

“Who? Dave?”

“No. Well, I mean, yes, you do. You look almost exactly the same and every second I spend in your presence tells me you’re both equally infuriating as well.” Dirk was torn between being flustered that he was being compared to Dave, who he was still a little starstruck about, or offended that he had somehow infuriated Karkat so quickly. “But that’s not who I meant.”

“Who _did_ you mean, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Why the fuck would I mind you asking? I brought it up in the first place.”

“Touché.” Karkat’s brand of anger reminded him of Roxy, in an odd way. Solid mask, but all masks fall eventually. “So?”

“What do you know about trolls?”

Dirk stood a little straighter. Finally a topic in which he wasn’t out of his depth. “Well, one of them flooded our planet. There were miles upon miles of records on troll anatomy and customs and societal norms. I don’t think there’s any human alive who knows more about trolls than I do, barring Roxy.”

“Show-off”

“Guilty as charged.” Dirk let himself smirk a little.  
  
“Okay, dipshit, but I meant trolls as in… us. Kanaya, Terezi, me… You know.”

That was harder to answer.

“Well, I know Kanaya is a rainbow drinker, which is terrifying. And I know she’s dating Rose, which is doubly terrifying considering what I know about her alpha self.” He shuddered at the thought of what those two could do together, frankly. “I know they make each other happy.”

The comments felt like admissions and he felt uncomfortably seen under Karkat’s scrutinous gaze but the events of the day had left him fried, and it was either this or listen to Jade and Terezi’s tenth rendition of Never Gonna Give You Up, so emotionally constipated with Karkat it was.

“I know Terezi likes red, which is the only thing Dave would mention during our conversation, for some reason.” Karkat snorted and Dirk felt himself smiling, just a little. “And I know that he thinks the world of you.”

Karkat didn’t seem ready for that admission, and if it had been anyone else, he was sure he’d be blushing furiously. But he knew what it would cost Karkat to blush in Alternia, so he wasn’t surprised when he just scoffed and looked away.

“So I guess, in the big scheme of things, I don’t know much at all.” He put his hand on his chin, to really push the point home. “But I also know everything there _is_ to know.”

“Are you always this pretentious?”  
  
“Only 80% of the time.”

“I don’t know if I want to know what the fuck the other 20% is.”

“Probably not.” It felt weird for Dirk to keep a conversation going, because he wasn’t particularly good at that, but he also felt like Karkat needed this, so he continued. “So, you were saying about trolls?”

“Well, I’m not sure if you know, but there used to be twelve of us.” Dirk hadn’t known that, but he wasn’t surprised to hear it. “Which is probably surprising looking at us now.”

“Not really. There is… It’s hard to explain, but I can see the empty spaces, I guess. It feels incomplete.”

Karkat looked at him with the kind of look only old people and 16 year old’s surrounded by shenanigans at all times could give.

“Is that some Sburb power bullshit?”  
  
“Who the fuck knows, man.”

“Heh.” He briefly looked at Dirk, before looking back outwards into nothing. “So, yeah, there were… so many of us and it was an unmitigated disaster from start to finish. None of us should have been friends in the first place, I think. That was my fault, too, in the end.” 

“Anyway, the point is you remind me of one of them.” Karkat looked like he couldn’t find the words he wanted to use and that frustrated him more than anything that had happened that day. “Well that’s not quite right, I see all of them in your group. It’s kind of hard not to, when we created you.”

“But Sollux, I… I see him in you, in Roxy. In Rose, and Dave, and Jade. I even see him in godforsaken John, which is a stretch, let me tell you.” He snorted at his own joke before continuing. “I can’t get him out of my head today.”

“What was he like?”

“He was… like you. Too smart for his own good, obsessed with his own hubris.” Dirk just barely held himself back from gasping in offense in a dramatic manner, but Karkat must have sensed it, because he gave him a shit-eating smirk before continuing. “He was crazy good at computers, like Roxy. He hated losing arguments but would never tell you he was angry, he’d just get revenge when you weren’t looking. That’s a Rose thing.”

“And Dave?”

For a moment, Dirk felt like he’d made an irreversible mistake, because Karkat’s eyes get glossy. He was trying to find the way to take it back when Karkat spoke again.

“He…” It took him a few tries before he managed to get the words out. “You know, Dave and I didn’t get along at all at first. Too many issues on both sides. I’m sure you’ve heard a little about it.”

“Yeah, I… Yeah.”  
  
“Well, Sollux and I were sort of like that. We just… annoyed each other so much. We were too different, I think. But there was also this… tenderness to our relationship. He was my best friend. Or at least the best of the friends who haven’t yet tried to murder me, but I’m still young.”

Dirk couldn’t help but laugh a little at that. Who knew Karkat had jokes?

“It’s like that with Dave, too. I could never bring myself to hate him, not in that way. Not in any way. He just… wants so badly to belong somewhere, with someone.” He said it so softly Dirk almost didn’t hear him. “Sollux did too.”

“He never would have admitted that, though. But sometimes, when it got really bad, we would talk. About the future, about what we’d do when we grew up. Did you know I wanted to be a threshecutioner? Yeah, well, we all knew it was never going to happen. But Sollux never said it. I’m sure he had plans upon plans on how to get me there, the asshole.”

Karkat turned around, looking at their friends running around at the bottom of the hill, but he didn’t look like he was seeing them. He looked like he was looking past them, into something far away.

“He’d go on, and on about how we’d break the system. I’d become a threshecutioner, and he’d use my intel to hack into HIC’s systems, and then Feferi would destroy her, and she would rule, and we’d never have to worry about anything ever again.” He gave a humorless laugh at that. “We could just… be. Like how we are going to on Earth C, or whatever the fuck these idiots are gonna name it.”

“What happened to him? To Sollux, I mean.”

“Eridan left him half dead, which I’m sure made his little binary bloodpusher sing. And then he fucked off with Aradia to chill in the void, I guess. Haven’t seen him since.”

“Well, that’s good, then, right?” Dirk blundered for a second at Karkat’s expression. “I mean, no, it’s horrible but… Well, he got what he wanted, right? To just be, without worrying about the empire?”

Karkat sighed, looking away from him once more.

“Isn’t that… Wasn’t that the goal?”

“No. Because he didn’t get it. Not really. Not like he wanted.” Karkat looked like he was about to cry, which was something Dirk didn’t want under any circumstances. “Not like this. That is nothing like this.”

A silence fell upon them, in which Dirk rapidly studied all the scenarios in which Dave got angry at him for upsetting his not-a-boyfriend and their relationship ended before it had even started. But Karkat spoke before he could really get into it.

“If you’re anything like Dave, and I know for a fucking fact that you are. You’re probably stretching yourself thin inside that stupid head to figure out how to make this better for me, and I’m interrupting to tell you there is no way to make this better.” Karkat sat himself down on the grass with a huff. “It’s whatever, I’ll get over it.”

Dirk didn’t want to admit this made him let out a sigh of relief, but that didn’t mean that he didn’t want to fix this. 

“Can I…?” He pointed to where Karkat was sitting, and Karkat responded with an expression that very clearly said ‘do whatever the fuck you want’.

“I think… that what he wanted doesn’t matter as much as you think.”

Karkat’s glare could have frozen hell.

“What?”

“It’s just… This… This isn’t what I wanted. What I wanted was for my world to be normal, to be raised by my brother, and not by a bunch of robots in the middle of the sea.”

“And it’s not what Dave wanted either. He wanted a brother that wasn’t an abusive piece of shit. And you wanted a planet that didn’t hate your guts.” Karkat hissed a little under his breath, which Dirk could understand. “We all wanted something different, but this is what we get.”

“You are so shit at comforting people, Dirk.”

“No! I mean- Yes, I _am_ bad at it. But that’s not what I meant.” He sighed. Why was this so hard? “Sometimes, what we want isn’t what we get. Most of the time, in fact. And that’s okay. Because maybe what we want changes over time.”

“I know I wouldn’t give up Roxy, Jane, and Jake for my brother, even if I didn’t have Dave now.” His friends were a part of who he was. He wasn’t himself without them. 

“And I doubt you’d give up this for what you wanted when you were 13, either.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’ve seen how you look at them.” Karkat frowned at him, but Dirk ignored him and looked back at the others. “Not just Dave. All of them. Even the people you just met, it’s… I can tell you care. And I can tell that you want what we are making here right now. And that has to count for something.”

“So maybe Sollux didn’t get this. And maybe he didn’t get what he wanted back then either. But maybe he’s got what he wants now. I think.” He was a lot less confident by the end of his spiel. Karkat Vantas was a lot more intimidating that Dave had originally mentioned and he is kind of withering under his gaze. “Maybe.”

“Hm.”

“What?”

“I think I really like you, Dirk Strider.” Dirk wasn’t sure if that had been a smile, he hadn’t known Karkat long enough to be able to tell, but it was disorienting nonetheless. “Come on, before the idiots realize we’re not there and come bring their loudness over here.”

“I don’t really think you can complain about volu- ow!”

“I take it back, I hate you with a fiery passion and I hope Jade throws you into space.”

Yeah. Okay.

**Author's Note:**

> heyyyyyyyyyy!!! here i am, with yet another goddamn fic in which i include an unreasonable amount of davekat for a completely unrelated subject matter (wait until you see the next one, that is WILD)
> 
> im obsessed with three people in this life and its dave, karkat and dirk, and so i make it a point to fill the hole that canon left me in terms of dirk and karkat interaction with my own words and so thats how this fic, that was supposed to be about karkat and sollux (with the prompt "not like this") became this. im not sorry about it.
> 
> anyway i hope you enjoyed it!! feel free to leave a comment if you have anything to say at all, i love reading them.
> 
> have a great day!!


End file.
